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‘Call him Richard, father,’ said Esther.

‘Richard, if he will allow me. Indeed, we are old friends, and now near neighbours; and, A PROPOS, how are we off for neighbours, Richard? The cottage stands, I think, upon your father’s land – a family which I respect – and the wood, I understand, is Lord Trevanion’s. Not that I care; I am an old Bohemian. I have cut society with a cut direct; I cut it when I was prosperous, and now I reap my reward, and can cut it with dignity in my declension. These are our little AMOURS PROPRES, my daughter: your father must respect himself. Thank you, yes; just a leetle, leetle, tiny – thanks, thanks; you spoil me. But, as I was saying, Richard, or was about to say, my daughter has been allowed to rust; her aunt was a mere duenna; hence, in parenthesis, Richard, her distrust of me; my nature and that of the duenna are poles asunder – poles! But, now that I am here, now that I have given up the fight, and live henceforth for one only of my works – I have the modesty to say it is my best – my daughter – well, we shall put all that to rights. The neighbours, Richard?’

Dick was understood to say that there were many good families in the Vale of Thyme.

‘You shall introduce us,’ said the Admiral.

Dick’s shirt was wet; he made a lumbering excuse to go; which Esther explained to herself by a fear of intrusion, and so set down to the merit side of Dick’s account, while she proceeded to detain him.

‘Before our walk?’ she cried. ‘Never! I must have my walk.’

‘Let us all go,’ said the Admiral, rising.

‘You do not know that you are wanted,’ she cried, leaning on his shoulder with a caress. ‘I might wish to speak to my old friend about my new father. But you shall come to-day, you shall do all you want; I have set my heart on spoiling you.’

‘I will just take ONE drop more,’ said the Admiral, stooping to help himself to brandy. ‘It is surprising how this journey has fatigued me. But I am growing old, I am growing old, I am growing old, and – I regret to add – bald.’

He cocked a white wide-awake coquettishly upon his head – the habit of the lady-killer clung to him; and Esther had already thrown on her hat, and was ready, while he was still studying the result in a mirror: the carbuncle had somewhat painfully arrested his attention.

‘We are papa now; we must be respectable,’ he said to Dick, in explanation of his dandyism: and then he went to a bundle and chose himself a staff. Where were the elegant canes of his Parisian epoch? This was a support for age, and designed for rustic scenes. Dick began to see and appreciate the man’s enjoyment in a new part, when he saw how carefully he had ‘made it up.’ He had invented a gait for this first country stroll with his daughter, which was admirably in key. He walked with fatigue, he leaned upon the staff; he looked round him with a sad, smiling sympathy on all that he beheld; he even asked the name of a plant, and rallied himself gently for an old town bird, ignorant of nature. ‘This country life will make me young again,’ he sighed. They reached the top of the hill towards the first hour of evening; the sun was descending heaven, the colour had all drawn into the west; the hills were modelled in their least contour by the soft, slanting shine; and the wide moorlands, veined with glens and hazelwoods, ran west and north in a hazy glory of light. Then the painter wakened in Van Tromp.

‘Gad, Dick,’ he cried, ‘what value!’

An ode in four hundred lines would not have seemed so touching to Esther; her eyes filled with happy tears; yes, here was the father of whom she had dreamed, whom Dick had described; simple, enthusiastic, unworldly, kind, a painter at heart, and a fine gentleman in manner.